ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE told his Strand editor, Herbert
Greenhough Smith ( 1835-1935), that 'A story always
comes to me as an organic thing and I never can recast it
without the Life going out of it.' ¹

On the whole, this certainly seems to describe Conan
Doyle's method with the Sherlock Holmes stories, long and
short. Such manuscript evidence as survives (approximately
half the stories) generally bears this out: there is remarkably
little revision. Sketches or scenarios are another matter.
Conan Doyle was no more bound by these at the end of his
literary life than at the beginning, whence scraps of paper
survive to tell us of 221B Upper Baker Street where lived
Ormond Sacker and J. Sherrinford Holmes. But very little
such evidence is currently available for analysis.

Conan Doyle's relationship with his most famous creation
was far from the silly label 'The Man Who Hated Sherlock
Holmes': equally, there was no indulgence in it. Though the
somewhat too liberal Puritan Micah Clarke was perhaps
dearer to him than Holmes, Micah proved unable to sustain
a sequel to the eponymous novel of 1889. By contrast,
'Sherlock' (as his creator irreverently alluded to him when
not creating him) proved his capacity for renewal 59 times
(which Conan Doyle called 'a striking example of the
patience and loyalty of the British public'). He dropped
Holmes in 1893, apparently into the Reichenbach Falls, as
a matter of literary integrity: he did not intend to be written
off as 'the Holmes man'. But public clamour turned Holmes
into an economic asset that could not be ignored. Even so,
Conan Doyle could not have continued to write about

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